


the long way down

by agnesgrey



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Brotp, Canonical Character Death, Death, Fix-It, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Infinity Stone Soul World (Marvel), Soul Stone (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-02-27 21:55:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18747874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agnesgrey/pseuds/agnesgrey
Summary: "Nat.If you were in heaven, or having some kind of after-life experience, would we both be dripping wet and would I still be a giant pain in your ass?"





	the long way down

When she dies, Natasha isn't afraid. From the start, she never expected to live too long, and she's lasted much, much longer than she or anyone else ever thought she would. She grits her teeth against the idea of her life flashing before her eyes, drowning in that sea of red, but that doesn't happen. She holds on to the idea of Laura, and the kids, and Clint's face when he gets to see them again, and her other family -- Steve and Sam and Wanda, Nick and Maria, James, Tony and even Bruce: the dead returned and the living restored, all of them whole again. She's never been afraid of dying, really, but she'd always thought it would be by someone else's hand, in the field. Everything is up close and sharply in focus and loud and overwhelming -- she knows that's her brain, trying to take in everything while chemicals pour through her system -- and the long way down is both unbearably interminable and lasts less than twenty seconds. 

Natasha has never been afraid of death, or dying, or mortal injuries: she was on intimate terms with all of that before she was five. She knows surviving can be worse than death, a hellish torture no theologian could ever describe. What is terrifying is when she _wakes up,_ after dying -- no, no, how is this possible? -- everything around her cold and wet, terror making her gasp so hard her chest hurts. She can't see, everything is enveloped in that dim gray light that might really be fog and looks like it exists to cloud your vision, not illuminate anything real. That ugly permanent eclipse in the sky, like a burnt out eye socket. Everything is dark orange and purple-grey, the colour of a dying smoky fire. Her head rings like a struck tuning fork: she feels it from her tight scalp to her arched feet, then it lets her go. She's so dazed she can't get to her feet.

Someone's calling her name, a man -- God damm it, did Clint jump too? But then how can they both be here? Did they fail? But it's not Clint's voice, it's deeper and louder, and right behind her. _"Natasha!"_ the man calls -- Clint? Schmidt? -- right behind her, and her reflexes kick in, just like she isn't dead at all. She's still half-sitting, and she spins around, lifts up on her hands, sweeps one stiff straight leg around in a kick while doing a one-legged squat with the other, and springs up off that foot to plant her knee squarely in the man's chest. She lands with her other knee clamped tight against his side, her forearm against his throat, one hand clasping the other so he can't break her hold. He struggles and gurgles underneath her, and she lets up the pressure just enough to let him breathe freely and snaps, "Answers. _Now."_

"It's me," the man she's sitting on says, "Nat, Natasha, it's me. Steve." She sits back, then gets off him entirely, her mind racing. She's dead, and Steve's gone back in time -- she thinks he's further gone than anybody left back at home might know, yet -- so this has to be some kind of a trick. She doesn't believe in the afterlife, so it's not a ghost. She knows time becomes very relative when you're dying -- people see all kinds of shit, white tunnels of light, loved ones, their own bodies far below as they float high in the air. She could even still be falling, for all she knows, except in her ears there's a weird echo of the terrible impact that would have splintered her bones, shattered her organs. She looks down at her own hands, shakes them a little, as if they might have fallen asleep. She feels fine. Better than fine. Whatever this is, she doesn't fucking like it at all. She backs away and says very cautiously and quietly, "Steve?"

Not-Steve seems to know better than to rush at her and try to grab her in a hug, which is a big point in his favour. He -- it -- he also seems injured; he's gasping and holding his side tight with one hand. The mist clears a little bit, and she sees he's wearing the quantum suit, just like she is, which probably means something to her subconscious but leaves her baffled. Her mission's done, her life is over. Not-Steve also seems to know how freaked out she is, and he rasps, not trying to sit up, "I'll tell you something....only the two of us know. In the church." He stops to breathe. "At Peggy's funeral. You -- you told me you found your parents' graves. Behind a chain-link fence. You pulled some weeds and left some flowers. And you said, 'We have what we have -- "

"'When we have it,'" Natasha finishes, sharp and harsh, because she really never told anyone else that, it _is_ something only the two of them would know, so that settles it: she's not dead yet, or more probably _mostly_ dead but not all the way yet, and her subconscious is providing her with a wonderful fantasy, the steadiest person she knows, the man who's been her ally the past five years. And more. Of course, it could be something like an alien consciousness native to the planet trying to probe her memories for amusement or intel, but Occam's Razor always prevails. (Then again, if anyone had told her when Clint had gotten her to come in out of the cold that she'd end her life dying years before a purple giant snapped his fingers and ended half of all life on earth, so she could trade her existence for theirs -- ) Maybe-Steve gasps a bit more, then does sit up, very slowly. Natasha resists the urge to rush over and help him, and instead sinks down on her haunches, trying to think. She supposes maybe it's fitting she has Steve as a final guide, even if he's just in her head. She's a little surprised it's not Nick, or the Soldier, or Yelena or Madame. But Steve shaped her as surely as any of them did, too. If not more so, during these past years when it was just the two of them rattling around in Tony's giant Avengers HQ like two aged parents after all the rest of the family died off or moved out. If she's dead, or dying, it's pointless to resist, since this isn't real and will be over soon and it's not like she can change anything. Or wants to change anything. Everything is as it should be: her ledger's finally balanced. She's finished.

"Nat," Maybe-Steve rasps, sounding a little better already, "it's me. It's Steve. I've come to take you home."

Natasha at first feels mortified -- the best her inner mind, her secret heart, can come up with, is _this?_ This corny melodramatic wish-fulfilment? The seconds drag on as she and the possible Steve stare at each other. Any minute now he's going to tell her to have faith, or something equally awful. But Maybe-Steve surprises her again. He sighs, pushing himself all the way upright, the smoke clearing a bit around them so she can make out the murky puddles in between great ridges of sand, the full unbroken ring of the eclipsed sun. "We've got a time machine, Nat. I'll stay here as long as it takes." He smiles, but not a happy smile, and says "My dance card's free for tonight."

And that _is_ Steve, her Steve, with the corny metaphor, the black-and-white thinking -- _we don't trade lives, it all goes, we have a duty to do what we can_ \-- and it hurts so much that she snaps, "Pretty big talk, for a hallucination."

His face changes again, a quick flash of pity -- she hates that more than anything else in the world and he knows that, or guesses it, because there's just a glimpse and it's gone. "Nat," he says quietly, urgently, like he's trying to put everything of himself into this one conversation. "You're alive. Trust me. _You are alive."_

That _really_ pisses her off, so she says, her voice rising, "No! I know this is a nice _fantasy,_ Rogers, that I've cooked up all for myself, but I'm _dead._ I wanted to die. I _meant_ it. It happened."

His voice is still very soft, his eyes pinned to her face. "It did," he agrees, like he's trying to get her around to his side. "You did die. You died. But, Nat....Natasha...." He clears his throat. "I had an idea. And. And it worked. I brought you back."

"My God, even when you're supposed to be a nice deathbed hallucination, you're completely impossible."

"Natasha." The first hint of annoyance starts sharpening his voice, adding deeper tones, just like with the real thing. "I'm here. You're _alive._ We're both here."

"If this is the afterlife I thought it would be....nicer," Natasha says to distract him, looking around. He doesn't take the bait.

 _"Nat._ If you were in heaven, or having some kind of after-life experience, would we both be dripping wet and would I still be a giant pain in your ass?"

Natasha opens her mouth, then shuts it again. She stares at him. A horrible feeling of certainty begins to creep in, chilling in its probability. _He had an idea,_ well _that_ fits. One of his terrible, terrible ideas. And once he has them, it's as good as done, you can't turn him aside from it; you might as well try to get a stream to run uphill.

"Did you think I'd....come back?" she says slowly, realizing that _of course he did_ as she says the words. Steve shakes his head, not looking at her -- one of his tells.

"And you're still a terrible liar. You were gonna trade. You for me. -- Just _admit_ it!" she cries, soaked to the bone and resurrected on an alien planet, and now she's going to have to start all over again, to _live,_ and they're both still sitting in a puddle. An alien planet puddle. God knows what is in this water, or if it's even water to begin with. She feels suddenly exhausted.

Now Steve does look at her, the defiant _Yes_ written all over his face. She wants to punch him. "Yeah," he says, setting his jaw, and that's him all right -- nobody that annoying could ever be a comforting hallucination. "Yeah, I was."

Natasha's shoulders sag, her head going back, and she loses her balance and slips the rest of the way into the puddle with a splash. "You, you ASSHOLE," she sputters, because he's laughing. "No, no!" he says, sloshing over to help her up -- again, it's pure Steve: he doesn't grab her but just leans in, offering his arm so she can lever herself up on it if she wants, staying a courteous distance. It's all so ridiculous it has to be real. "I wasn't -- at you -- I just thought about how much you sounded like Bucky. That's all."

 _"And_ Sam," Natasha said, and then it's like all the water freezes, over her heart. She clutches at his arm. "Steve. Steve, did they -- Sam, and James -- Wanda -- and Fury?" Steve holds her shoulders in both his hands, the two of them standing ankle-deep in the water, the surroundings definitely more visible around them now -- not that that's an improvement.

"You saved everybody," he whispers, still looking straight at her. "You did it, Nat. You saved Sam, and Bucky, and Wanda, Fury -- T'Challa, Shuri, everybody was there -- everybody -- " She's shaking her head, she doesn't understand. "You should have seen Wanda, you would've been so proud. And Carol! Carol came back -- " _"Danvers?"_ \-- "Everyone was there, everyone but" -- Steve can't say "you," his lips form the word but his voice crumples up like a ball of paper and then he's crying. Not manly crystalline little perfectly sliding tears with red-rimmed eyes, but honest, loud ugly crying, the kind she's only heard from him once before, after the Snap. It almost sounds like braying. She puts her arms around him and he gives in even more, puts his head down on her shoulder and just bawls. She staggers a little under his weight, shifts her weight to find a better position to support him. 

"What _happened?"_ she asks softly, right into his ear. "Rogers, _what the hell did you do?"_

He laugh-sobs a little bit, then pulls slightly away from her, not letting her go. He wipes one hand hard across his face, then wraps that arm right back around her. "We, um, we had to put the stones back. If it worked. And it did -- Bruce, he -- Tony made this gauntlet, like out of one of his suits, and we put the stones in it and Bruce got everyone back -- but then Thanos -- " His voice crumples again. "Tony -- "

"Tony's gone," she says slowly. This is sounding more like real life: victory, but at a price you wouldn't pay if you knew what it was. Unless you were a saint, or a hero, or a fool. Steve nods, obviously struggling not to break down again. "Tony....yeah, he. He's gone. And, and. _Anyway,"_ he says with heartbreaking determination, "we had the stones, and Bruce kept saying we had to put them back, he kept going on about the Ancient One and how he made her a promise and all the timelines would break if we didn't, I don't know. I was just so tired. Clint told me what happened, and Nebula, they were both so....Bruce said he tried. But he couldn't get you back. So I thought....And then that _thing,_ it said, he said....you must lose what you love." His voice turns bitter, quoting. "A soul for a soul. So I -- " He breaks off, too late.

"You _jumped,"_ Natasha breathes, and this is it, final proof if she still needed it: Rogers jumps out of fucking _everything._ Planes, helicarriers, giant buildings, he's been throwing himself off cliffs his whole life. "Oh my fucking God, oh, Steve, you _didn't."_

"But I did," he says softly, with that fucking little smile she sometimes wants to slap off his face.

"You did. Of course you did. You fucking IDIOT!" Natasha shrieks, and steps away to fake-pummel his chest. He reaches up to easily hold her hands, both of them laughing a little too loud and wild, the edge of hysteria cutting through. "I gotta sit down. Right now. Of course there's probably no booze in this whole fucking place." She raises her voice: "Hey! Out there! If I'm dead, I want some cold chardonnay!" They wait. Nothing happens. This is reality, all right. Steve lets himself down cautiously, groaning a bit -- she wonders if he has cracked or even broken ribs, bad bruises, internal bleeding. Maybe he'll die here instead of her, and she'll have to go back empty-handed, alone.

"I tried fighting him," Steve admits, and oh, Jesus, of course he did. _Of course you did,_ Natasha mouths, looking up to heaven -- she catches sight of the blacked-out sun and looks away fast. "But he was just -- air, it was like trying to grab smoke. So I just threw it out, as hard as I could -- "

"Should I call you Whit now?" she breaks in.

" -- I wasn't going to give it to _him,"_ Steve goes on, glowering and ignoring her, meaning: Johann Schmidt, the Red Skull, Keeper of the soul stone now, and forever. There's the old jut of the jaw, too maddening to be unreal. "And in case that wasn't enough...."

"You jumped."

"I jumped," he agrees, unrepentant. She's going to kill him.

"You thought you would die."

"That was kind of the impression I got from the Ghost of Fascism Past, yeah. 'Steven, son of Sarah, wooo,'" he mocks. "I don't _think_ he can leave," he adds cautiously. "He's the guardian of the stone, so he's bound to it -- to this place? -- somehow. I don't trust him, whatever he says. But he said -- well, what made me really angry, was, he said...." He looks up, his eyes that summer-ocean-blue even in the dim ugly light. "He said you'd be bound here, forever, anyway, even if I didn't give it back to him. And I couldn't....I don't know, time and space, they don't work right here. But I think it might be Hell." His voice is very quiet. "I wasn't gonna just leave you behind, anyway, even before that. But I wasn't gonna to give it back to him after he fucking said _that._ That you'd just be stuck here no matter what." His voice is tight, vicious, pure Brooklyn for a minute.

"We don't trade lives?" Nat says, needling just a little. He rolls his eyes, maybe embarrassed.

"Yeah, that was -- okay, that was wrong, then, maybe. But it's not wrong all the time."

"What I did," Natasha says slowly, "I wanted to do it. No -- I didn't want to. But I was....okay with it. If it had to be me. If it was what was gonna work." He doesn't say anything, and she presses harder: "It was what _worked,_ Steve."

"That's not the only thing that's important," he says, not looking at her, and it's such an old argument between them, her practicality versus his idealism, that it's almost comforting. But he's not done: he's fidgeting, his long legs drawn up so they're jackknifed nearly under his chin, fiddling with his fingers and looking away from her. "Nat, listen. I saw Peggy....I went back to see her." 

This sounds more like it, the part where he confesses how he screwed the pooch, how all the timelines are on fire and they need her back to fix an even bigger fuckup. "Why?" she asks, openly frustrated. _"Why_ would you risk the -- "

He shakes his head. "It wasn't just me -- we fucked up, in New York. While you were -- " He swallows hard and has to be quiet for a moment. "We didn't get the Tesseract. We had to go back, further -- Tony knew where it was -- at SHIELD, in 1970. In that bunker where we talked to Zola, you remember?" Like she could ever forget that, the moment when she'd found out her carefully balanced redemption had been nothing but just another lie. "So, we went there. I didn't talk to her," he says defensively. "But I saw her....through a window in her office. She had that picture of me, on her desk."

Nat wants to say she thinks they should go, they've been here too long, she doesn't know if it's a good thing for whatever lives here to hear all this -- if it's a good thing for _her_ to hear this. Some friendships don't come back from these kinds of confessions, not unchanged. But it's Steve telling her, so she listens. As long as he needs to say it to her, she'll listen. But she's been keeping an eye on the surrounding terrain, and now she's sure of it: the sun isn't changing, the mists aren't really rising, but it's getting brighter, the light shining off the wells of water in between the hard sculpted dunes, flecks of mica -- or whatever it might be here -- glittering in the sand. He was right about how time and space work differently here -- or might not work at all: there's no sign of the two towering pillars, like gates, that reminded her of her first sight of Notre Dame as a teenager, the grey slick rocks she and Clint had to climb and help each other over, nothing visible beyond them but the ugly grey void out to the edge of the horizon, looking the way grief and loss felt. When she turns her attention back to him again, Steve's wound down, like a clock.

"The one where you look like one pound of nothing in a ten-pound bag?" she asks, using one of Fury's phrases, and he smiles like it hurts his mouth, but it's a real smile. "The _famous_ one?"

The smile gets bigger, unwillingly. She remembers how when she first knew him, how it was a private game with herself to get him to smile, a real smile, and how often she'd lost, and now she understands why. "Yeah. The one they took in boot camp, with the....t-shirt and the tags, and everything. I just wandered into her office by accident, I guess. And then I looked through, through this _window,_ and I saw her....she wasn't old, like when I first got to know you. She was maybe barely getting there -- she wasn't even fifty. But I could see, there were these little lines in her face" -- he traces them on his own, smooth face, between his eyebrows and at the corners of his mouth, forefinger across his forehead -- "and her hair was, it wasn't salt-and-pepper, it had these silver streaks in it, shining in the light." He's looking off to the middle distance now, seeing her so intently Nat almost expects to be able to see that older, still-vibrant Peggy too. "She was still beautiful. The most....the only girl I...." He trails off, lost.

The sky is definitely lit up now, not the deep blue of Earth, but pale and bright, and worse, the light's reflecting back up off all the water; they're sitting ducks. "Steve," she tries, "we should -- "

"No!" Steve shouts, and she goes still. She's seen Steve angry before, and angry at her, but this is something different. "No, Nat, I have to -- listen, I have to tell you. I figured it out. It's why I knew I had to get you back. The real reason. And if we go now, I won't be brave enough to say it, and the words will be all wrong, and other people will be there and we'll start talking to _them,_ and before too long it'll be too late and I won't be able to tell you at all. It has to be now. Right now." 

That just figures. "Fine," she says, with bad grace. The one time Steve Rogers actually feels like unpacking his extremely vintage emotional baggage, they're stuck on an alien planet hellscape and he's probably hurt and she's still not quite sure all the way through whether or not she's really here. Steve just looks at her, a slapped puppy, and she sighs, puts her hand on his. "Sorry. Go on. Really." He takes a deep breath, and she can tell he's trying to get to the point, make more sense, and she squeezes his hand.

"Anyway, she was in the room next to her office, where I was, and there were these blinds in the way -- and the lights were off on my side, it was kind of like a one-way mirror, I guess. I saw her through the glass. And it was like, you remember, how I kept looking at her in my compass....but this was _her._ She'd had a life -- she told me all about it, when I first got back, before she got really -- sick -- a long life, and it's not that I wasn't part of it, she said I was always changing her life, even after I was dead. But where she was, it wasn't her past. It was her life. And she was living it. She was trying to make things better. And they are, you know, in the future -- in the life we have now -- they're better. It's not perfect. I don't think any place with people in it can be. But so much has changed, so many good things have happened. _Vaccines,"_ he says with wonder, like someone else talking about the stars, and that's pure Steve Rogers too. "I remember the first time I heard about the polio vaccine....anyway," he says self-consciously, and she holds onto his hand, puts her other hand on his arm to move in a little closer. 

"She told me, we couldn't go back. Not either of us. We had to start over. And that was what you were doing, all this time, the past five years" -- Nat startles and tries to draw away, but he holds on firmly -- "holding everything together, keeping it going, you didn't go off to a -- farm, or a cabin....I was just kind of trying to do what you did, to keep going." Now his voice is harsh. "I know what you did, here -- I did it too, when I put the Valkyrie down in the water. But I just saved one city. You saved -- _everyone,_ Nat. Half the world. Half of _everything._ You want to make everything better, like Peggy -- even when it's all shit. But _you_ were already better. You already saved us. Hell, you saved _me._ But you can't do it if you're not _there._ And I think _that_ wipes out your _God damn_ ledger." He's angry, but crying again, and Natasha's own eyes are humiliatingly hot, stinging. 

"Oh, Steve," she says helplessly.

He leans over and kisses her, more deeply than he has any of the times they'd comforted each other over the past five years -- not for long, but they cling to each other after their mouths part, and Nat shudders, suddenly sick to death of this place and its wrenching exchanges, what had Nebula called it? _A dominion of death._

"I wanna go home, Steve," she says. "Let's go home."

 _"You_ did it," he says unrelentingly, "you saved everybody, it was you. You were the -- "

"Just -- _stop,"_ Natasha protests. "Not now, okay? I want to get out of here. To go home."

"Okay," he says reluctantly. "All right...." He stands up, both of them still hanging onto each other. He goes on talking as he synchronizes her suit; she looks away, scanning the horizon, trying to see if anything's hiding behind the tall ripples of sand or about to rise up from the mirrory pools. "Everyone -- they all came back. Sam, T'Challa, Shuri -- Bucky -- the whole Wakandan army -- you should've seen it. I kept thinking, it wasn't fair, you should have been there -- "

She says quickly, desperate to leave, "You can tell me all about it. Later?"

"Right, right -- we should get out of here, you're right. This place is no good." He pats at his own suit. "I think, yeah, it looks okay -- "

"It's okay?" Nat says skeptically. "It should have been broken, you falling that far-- "

"Well, _you_ should be dead," Steve drawls, his dry humour back at last, and Nat can't help the grin that actually hurts her face.

"Well, so should you," she sasses back, and Steve laughs, a real laugh, before looking for something behind her -- "Aw yeah, there you are." He picks up a large, round object that shines and flashes in the dim light, almost blinding -- it's his shield, of course, he must have landed on it like in D.C., but she looks closer and sees two stars, not one, and the pattern of the stripes is different. "Where did you get that?" she asks suspiciously. 

Steve looks down and smiles. "Long story."

"We've got nothing _but_ time," she says pointedly, but now he's the one who shakes his head, saying "Later. We gotta get you out of here. Let's go home."

"All right," she says, determined to get _that_ story out of him when they get back -- and she does believe it, even if it makes her a fool, that he's taking her home, she'll see everyone again, all the deaths unwound -- and Steve crushes her to him, as Tony's clever machine sparks to life, and whispers in her ear, "See you in a minute."

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Anaïs Mitchell's folk opera/Broadway musical _Hadestown,_ which I fell in love with -- gosh, ten years ago now. It's an endless artistic inspiration for me.
> 
> ["Wait for Me" (folk opera studio recording)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apWfRFMt1dw)
> 
> ["Wait For Me" ( NYC Sings Hadestown)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uoE8Pfyx-8)
> 
> ["Wait For Me" (Broadway live)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HXxrtSdFjc)
> 
> [HERMES]  
> How to get to Hadestown:  
> You’ll have to take the long way down  
> Through the underground, under cover of night  
> Laying low, staying out of sight  
> There ain’t no compass, brother, ain’t no map  
> Just a telephone wire and the railroad track  
> You keep on walking and you don’t look back  
> ’Til you get to the bottomland
> 
> [ORPHEUS]  
> Wait for me, I’m coming  
> Wait, I’m coming with you  
> Wait for me, I’m coming too  
> I’m coming too
> 
> [My visual reference for Vormir](https://i.redd.it/llcym7nqx5d11.png)
> 
> "Whit": Natasha is referring to Whit Wyatt, the winning pitcher in the only Dodgers victory against the New York Yankees in the 1941 World Series, who also pitched in the game against the Phillies Steve woke up to in _The First Avenger._
> 
> [The conversation between Nat and Steve](https://youtu.be/G8Cg_a3oBbg?t=157) in St Luke's Cathedral after Peggy's funeral was cut from _Civil War._


End file.
